Saturday, July 19, 2008

File Recovery / Undelete on ext3

I had the unfortunate situation where I had deleted some files (not many, only 2 or 3 files) and really did not want to re-do the week's worth of work. Google to the rescue. I found ext3grep, printed out the instructions (huge, need condensing for common-case), and built the software. It required a number of fixes to compile, which I'll forward upstream when I get a chance.
Did it work? More or less, yes. I got my files back. The time-range searching doesn't seem to work, as I could narrow down the window of deletion to about 15 minutes but the list of recovered files was HUGE, including files I had deleted weeks ago. However, the software did what it was supposed to do, and easily enough. It takes some time, but it did the job.
I gave them 10 Euro (about 400 American Pesos).